The Milk Cup is a rare event in esports, featuring only female competitors and produced by a female-led team from Raidiant. Further, female streamer and Fortnite esports player ThePeachCobbler is partnering with the event to promote gender equality in esports. Despite women composing nearly half of the gaming community, women only represent 5% of total esports players. The Milk Cup hopes to contribute to changing this statistic by putting female esports players in the spotlight and creating role models in the esports space.
In its first-ever edition, The Milk Cup sees Fortnite competitors vying for their share of a $250,000 USD prize pool over three qualifiers and a final LAN competition. The generous prize pool comes courtesy of sponsor GonnaNeedMilk – hence, the name of the competition. The first qualifier round took place on the 23rd of May, giving a glimpse into the potential success of the Milk Cup moving forward. It’s worth looking at which co-streamers covered The Milk Cup and the overall performance of the event’s official channel.
Co-Streaming Makes Up Over Half of All Viewership of the Milk Cup
Fortnite is one of the biggest games in esports worldwide in 2024, giving a female-centric competition the best chance of thriving on live streaming. The official erena channel for the event brought in 25K hours watched over the four-hour competition. This performance isn’t as strong as one might have hoped for a female-led event, but given that this is just the first round of an as-yet untested esports event, organizers Raidiant and ThePeachCobbler will be happy to have drummed up some hype.
That’s not the end of the story, however. Official coverage represented only 44% of the total 58.5K hours watched. The majority of viewership came from co-streaming – a trend we’ve seen with recent esports events as well. Interestingly, the top co-streamer for The Milk Cup was actually a male creator: AussieAntics, an Australian Fortnite streamer. AussieAntics pulled in 10K hours watched alone – 17% of total viewership. His coverage of the event may create a much-needed bridge into female esports for male audiences. Meanwhile, Sommerset was the top female co-streamer with 6K hours watched.
This performance shows that viewers are interested in female-led esports. Hopefully with fans’ interest piqued, the subsequent qualifiers on the 20th of June and the 25th of July will pick up increased viewership heading towards the LAN championship later this year. Stream Hatchet will be watching to see how The Milk Cup progresses.
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